Internet to Congress: CISPA is TMI

Yesterday, EFF and other civil liberties organizations launched a campaign to change the public discussion around the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), a cybersecurity bill introduced by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD) (H.R. 3523). The bill would carve out huge exemptions to bedrock privacy law and allow companies to share private user data with the government without any judicial oversight. The result? Untold and unfettered personal data flowing from online service providers like AT&T and Google to government agencies like the NSA.

Not surprisingly, we think this is a terrible idea. We're huge proponents of network security—but we know that sacrificing the civil liberties of Internet users is an unnecessary and unwanted tradeoff.

We called on the Internet community to use our new Congressional Twitter Handle Detection Tool to find their members of Congress and tweet to them in protest of CISPA. We asked the Internet to showcase the types of unnecessary private data that could be swept up under CISPA. If companies could spy on your online interactions and share it with the government, what would the government receive?

Twitter users began using the hashtags #CongressTMI and #CISPA to showcase the details of their online communications with insightful and often humorous results. Here's a few of the tweets from this morning.

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